What is the objective in Survival now?

I started playing again some days ago on 1.12.2 version. I see some new animals are added to the game. I found a village. I've been freeloading of off them since. I took over a house, bred some chickens and cows and started a mine to find iron mainly. I found a witch who killed me, unfortunately. I was curious what she would drop.

Back during 1.4, all you need to do was to go the Nether and then kill Ender Dragon.

1. Are there more objectives now in vanilla Minecraft?

2. I noticed some new blocks like Andesit, Diorite, and Granite none of which seem to be workable to craft tools for example. Is there any use to these new blocks?

Andesite, Granite, and Diorite are mostly useless; they're just alternatives of stone. I use granite and diorite for decoration.

Since 1.4.2 (I think), you can spawn a Wither from Soul Sand and Wither skeletons, which is stronger than the Ender Dragon and is necessary to kill to construct a Beacon.

Ocean monuments and woodland mansions now exist in the deep ocean and the roofed forest. Ocean monuments are defended by guardians and elder guardians, and woodland mansions are defended by illagers. Both are very rare and have valuable loot if you can breach their defenses.

Killing the Ender Dragon is only the very beginning for me - while there is no real objective afterwards the game doesn't end either, and the vast majority of my gameplay, including my favorite part, all happens after this point; in my first world (created nearly 5 years ago) I'm well on my way to exploring an entire continent (1.6.4) underground, which has taken more than 140 real-time days of gameplay so far, compared to only around 2 days of "pre-Ender dragon gameplay in a recent world (which itself had about 20 more days of gameplay, all spent exploring caves; I only stopped playing on it once I'd found everything my mod added). On average, I've collected about 3,100 resources per play session - across 967 sessions for nearly 3 million overall - just to give you an idea of how much caving I do - and this world is essentially vanilla (with a few minor mods like crafting 9 rails into a block for compact storage in my inventory) - and I've never updated past 1.6.4 (which is essentially the same as 1.4 to me; I don't use horses (1.6) or redstone (updated in 1.5), or many of their other additions, mainly just coal blocks, hay bales (for the storage), and quartz ore), with no end in sight.

New hoops (eg. wither, illagers) may be added as well as new toys to play with; both decorative [wood and stone variants] and functional [observers, beacons]… but the fundamental purpose of the game still hasn't been changed.

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WARNING: I have an extemely "grindy" playstyle; YMMV — if this doesn't seem fun to you, mine what you can from it & bin the rest.

Minecraft is a game without goals. You make your goals. Yes there is benchmarks like the enderdragon and wither but it's about what you want to do. It's virtual Legos. You have described the style of play on on adventure maps. It sounds like your projecting RPG elements into a sandbox game.

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Yes i know, my spelling sucks.

Check out my You-Tube Channel (BringerofKaos) for plenty of Minecraft Content and my Lets Play series:

Minecraft is a game without goals. You make your goals. Yes there is benchmarks like the enderdragon and wither but it's about what you want to do. It's virtual Legos. You have described the style of play on on adventure maps. It sounds like your projecting RPG elements into a sandbox game.

That is true. You set your own goals. In one of my worlds in the past, I built a railway between the mainland and a relatively small island. I also built a normal looking stone base building. Later I mined a very large mountain from top to sea level which was a stupid idea cos at that elevation 99% of the yield is dirt and cobblestone.

I don't want to do things I did before, so I downloaded a bunch of worlds and modpacks to explore and adventure in instead.

The goal of most people who play survival is to hand-build a really cool base. This basically never ends, especially on a server where you can build together, because there is always some new complicated machine or something you can think of to make.

I've wished survival terrain was varied enough to justify extensive exploring, but right now, after you've seen each biome once or twice and discovered a woodland mansion and ocean monument, visited the nether, nether fortress, the end, and the end cities, you've basically seen everything. But it does take longer to do all that now so I would say adventuring has been improved a bit.

In 1.13 we can add custom structures and other cool stuff to the generation so this may change soon with super-rare structures in player-made survival settings that are also still random!

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that's where the beauty of minecraft starts. every thought, every idea can be planned out and built. the game does have an end with credits and stuff, but thats not really the end of the game. defeating the ender dragon is an easy task, you could do it in a few hours if you really wanted to.

the actual end of the game comes into sight when you have finished every project you can imagine. it is only limited by the player's imagination.

this is what makes minecraft the biggest game in history of video gaming, and i'm proud to be a fan and player from the very first hour and until the day i die.